JavaFX 1.3 with NetBeans 6.9 beta has been released. JavaFX 1.3 is said to be an major update and provides several performance and functional improvements:

New and enhanced support for UI controls, CSS, and programmatic layout

A native JavaFX font family called Amble

Support for the development of TV applications, including a new TV emulator

Enhancements for mobile applications, with the availability of the mobile emulator on the Mac platform

Support and improved editing features in NetBeans IDE 6.9 Beta

New features and enhanced performance in JavaFX Production Suite

Bind performance: 2-3x faster

Applet start-up time: 20% faster (with Java SE 6u18+)

Text Animation: 5-10x faster (frames per second)

Highly complex animations: up to 10x faster (frames per second)

Memory usage: 20-33% reduction (real-world apps, with Java SE 6u18+)

UI Controls: 50% faster, 33%-50% less memory (typical)

JavaFX 1.3 ships with NetBeans IDE 6.9 Beta, which includes the JavaFX Composer, a visual editor for form-like user-interfaces.

It might be hard to believe that JavaFX has only been in the market for less than one and a half years. In that time, we’ve built out the foundation for mobile with a deployment ready runtime, delivered a library of UI controls to make it substantially easier to build out consistent user interfaces, and were able to entice developers to download over 400,000 copies of our tools by our 1.2 release…

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Haven't quite tried out JavaFX, but hope to soon. Keen to see how it compares with Flex & other RIA alternatives. I guess the success of JavaFX kind of depends on if / how well its features match / surpass the established Adobe Flex.